Master’s Thesis 2016 30 ECTS
International Environment and Development Studies (Noragric)
Recognizing Women in the Struggle for Social and Environmental
Justice in the Context of the Belo
Monte Hydropower Dam in the
Brazilian Amazon
Tove Mariann Heiskel
Recognizing Women in the Struggle for Social and Environmental Justice in the Context of the Belo Monte Hydropower Dam in the Brazilian Amazon
Master Thesis
The Department of International Environment and Development Studies, Noragric, is the international gateway for the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU). Eight departments, associated research institutions and the Norwegian College of Veterinary Medicine in Oslo. Established in 1986, Noragric’s contribution to international development lies in the interface between research, education (Bachelor, Master and PhD programmes) and assignments.
The Noragric Master thesis are the final theses submitted by students in order to fulfil the requirements under the Noragric Master programme “International Environmental Studies”,
“International Development Studies” and “International Relations”.
The findings in this thesis do not necessarily reflect the views of Noragric. Extracts from this publication may only be reproduced after prior consultation with the author and on condition that the source is indicated. For rights of reproduction or translation contact Noragric.
© Tove Mariann Heiskel, December 2016 theiskel@gmail.com
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Declaration
I, Tove Mariann Heiskel, declare that this thesis is a result of my research investigations and findings. Sources of information other than my own have been acknowledged and a reference list has been appended. This work has not been previously submitted to any other university for award of any type of academic degree.
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Acknowledgements
This thesis would not have been written were it not for the help, support and encouragement of numerous people. I especially would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Esben Leifsen, for his guidance, comments and encouragement, which have been of great value during the entire process of this work. I would also like to thank the Department for International Environment and Development Studies (Noragric) and the association Water, Rivers and People for providing travelling funds to carry out my fieldwork.
Special thanks go to the Movement of Dam-Affected People (MAB) coordinators in Pará, who helped me throughout fieldwork in 2015, introduced me to informants and social movements in Altamira and accompanied me in the field. Thank you all for your time, help, openness and patience. I am very grateful to the MAB in São Paulo for receiving me at the National Meeting of Dam-Affected People and for making space for me in the field-trip they organized to the Xingu and Tapajós Rivers in 2013. This travel was organised by MAB in Altamira and Itaituba, and it lay the base for this thesis.
I would also like to express my sincere gratitude and recognition to all the informants. Thank you for sharing your touching stories with me.
I owe a special thanks to Professor Pedro Arrojo, from the University of Zaragoza, who introduced me to the problems with mistaken water policies. I am very grateful for everything I learnt from him about large dams, human impacts and social struggles during the years of work in the Water, Rivers and Peoples exhibition and it´s social agenda.
Thanks to Eric Cezne and Beth Gelb who translated several of the interviews for me and helped out with clarifications in some of the other interviews. Your help is most appreciated.
I also owe an enormous gratitude to Alberto Bernués for his unwavering support, advice and encouragement during all steps of this thesis, and for being by my side in good and difficult times – this thesis would not be possible without you. I am forever grateful. My heartfelt gratitude goes to our wonderful children, Matilde and Elias, for their understanding, help and patience in the weeks I was away and during a chaotic time during the writing process. I can never thank you enough.
Abstract
In this thesis, I explain the interlinkages between large dams, women and struggles for social justice within the context of the Belo Monte dam. First, I study how and why women are impacted in different ways by the Belo Monte project, and secondly, I explore how affected women, involved in social movements, react to the effects of the Belo Monte hydropower dam, and what results their struggle has given.
The study is based on a qualitative research methodology. The empirical data derived from semi-structured interviews and analyzed by means of inductive content analysis. The
discussion of the results was framed within the three dimensions of social and environmental justice theory (distribution, recognition and participation) and conceptualised in a gender perspective, with a focus on women.
The findings show that people from riverside communities were impoverished by
dispossession and maldistribution practises imposed by the construction authorities and also by their collective abandonment of the uprooted people in terms of public services,
mitigation- and rehabilitation strategies. These sudden and vast changes affected women severely because of their traditional position as caretakers of the family, linked to their home and community. The forced displacement to inland resettlement-suburbs with lacking public infrastructure and water supply, increased and complicated women´s daily work burdens and ended their incomes from resource-dependent smallholder activities. Existing problems of gender-related violence and sexual abuse increased after the Belo Monte project due to the vast immigration of construction workers and the social confusion the project generated. No adequate measures had been taken to avoid this situation. Being bound to the home and family where the grievances, problems and desolation were most evident, women ended up in the very short end of distributional inequity having to cope and overcome the challenges.
While these impacts are significant, I argue that increased awareness about local women´s lives, losses and claims are important to implement measures to overcome them (Buechler et al. 2015; Dyck 2005), and importantly, to recognize that local women´s interests are different than the ideas powerful decision-makers have for development. To obtain change, it is
important to include women´s participation in decision-making arenas in large socio- environmental projects such as the Belo Monte dam, and likewise in the construction of national policies and regulations.
I suggest that by paying attention to women´s lives, voices and actions, one can obtain valuable information about some of the hidden drivers of social and environmental change such as: unjust distribution, misrecognition of difference and exclusion in decision-making processes, which are all obstacles to a move towards equity and justice. In this thesis, I conclude that women´s participation helps building gender-just movements and incorporates women´s claims in political strategies associated with socio-environmental movements;
strategies that demand just distribution, recognition and participation in order to confront economic, cultural and political oppression of marginalised groups, with women at the centre.
List of abbreviations
ANEEL Agência Nacional de Energia Elétrica- Brazilian Electricity Regulatory Agency ABNT Associação Brasileira de Normas Técnicas- Brazilian Association of Technical Norms
BNDES Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social- Brazilian Development Bank
CCBM Consórcio Construtor Belo Monte- Belo Monte Construction Consortium CDDPH Conselho de Defesa dos Direitos da Pessoa Humana- Council for the Defense of Human Rights (Brazil)
EIA Environmental Impact Assessment FPIC Free, Prior and Informed Consent
FUNAI Fundação Nacional do Índio- Agency for Indigenous Affairs
IBAMA Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renováveis - Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Natural Renewable Resources
ILO International Labour Organization
ISA Instituto Socio-Ambiental- Socio-Environmental Institute
MAB Movimento do Atingidos por Barragens- Movement of Dam-Affected People MMC Movimento Mujeres Camponesas- Movement of Peasant Women
MMTACC Movimento de Mulheres Trabalhadoras de Altamira Campo e Cidade- Movement of Women Workers in Altamira
MPF Ministério Público Federal- Federal Public Prosecutor MW Megawatt
MXVPS Movimento Xingo Vivo Para Sempre- Xingu Forever Alive Movement NGO Non-Governmental Organization
PBA Plano Básico Ambiental- Basic Environmental Plan
PAC Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento- Growth Acceleration Program
List of figures
Figure 1. Altamira, Novo Horizonte in Brazil Novo and Belo Monte region 9 Figure 2. Location of urban resettlement areas in Altamira 11
Figure 3. Scheme of the analytical framework 15
Figure 4. State Agencies and Corporate Actors involved in the Belo Monte dam 28
Figure 5. Norte Energia Consortium shareholders 29
Figure 6. Riverside community by the Xingu River located in the flood-area of the reservoir (2013)
45 Figure 7. Riverside in Altamira city before reservoir flooding (2013) 55 Figure 8. Demolished houses by the riverside in Altamira city (2015) 55 Figure 9. Boa Esperança district in Altamira before demolition (2013) 56 Figure 10. Boa Esperança district in Altamira before demolition (2013) 56 Figure 11. Jatobá, where housing for 1,100 families was constructed 57 Figure 12. Jatobá, resettlement area near Altamira constructed by Norte Energia 58 Figure 13. The occupied camp and land in Novo Horizonte (municipality of Brazil Novo) 67 Figure 14. The occupied camp and land in Novo Horizonte (municipality of Brazil Novo) 68 Figure 15. Roadblock of the Trans-Amazonian highway, organized by MAB in Altamira
(2015)
99 Figure 16. Embroidery from the project Arpilleras about large dam´s impact on women 103
List of boxes
Box 1. Forced evictions 30
Box 2. Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and the Basic Environmental Plan (PBA)
34
Box 3. MAB claims on protection of women 98
Box 4. Transcript of a part of the speech of the Secretary of the Presidency, Mr.
Gilberto Carvalho, in MAB´s National Meeting held in São Paulo in 2013
107
Table of contents
Declaration ... v
Acknowledgements ... vii
Abstract ... ix
List of abbreviations ... xi
List of figures ... xii
List of boxes ... xii
Table of contents ... xiii
1. Introduction ... 1
1.1. Objectives and research questions ... 2
1.2. Structure of the thesis ... 3
2. Methodology ... 5
2.1. Project background and research approach ... 5
2.2. Study area and Belo Monte dam ... 8
2.3. Sampling approach ... 11
2.4. Interviews ... 12
2.5. Data analysis... 14
2.6. Limitations of the study ... 16
3. Theoretical framework ... 19
3.1. Bridging gender and social and environmental justice theories ... 19
3.2. The gender perspective ... 20
3.3. Social and environmental justice ... 21
3.3.1. The three dimensions of social and environmental justice... 23
4. Results and discussion ... 27
4.1. Actors involved, legal controversies of expropriation, consultation and licensing processes ... 27
4.1.1 Actors involved ... 27
4.1.2. Occupied land and forced evictions ... 30
4.1.3. General hearings ... 32
4.1.5. Licensing process ... 35
PART I ... 37
4.2. Women, expropriation and alienation from natural resources ... 37
4.3. Women and compensations ... 46
4.4. Women and displacement ... 52
4.4.1. Breach of community bond, housing and social services ... 52
4.5. Employment and child-care ... 61
4.6. Education ... 63
4.7. Occupation of land ... 65
4.8. Women´s body and safety ... 70
4.8.1. Recognition of fatherhood ... 70
4.8.2. Violence ... 71
4.8.3. Sexual abuse ... 72
4.8.4. Sexual exploitation ... 75
4.9 Security measures – repressive methods ... 78
PART II ... 81
4.10. Resistance to the Belo Monte dam: women at the grassroots ... 81
4.10.1 Women´s participation in struggle for rights ... 82
4.10.2 Women: weak in politics, strong in movements ... 83
4.10.3 Women and education ... 90
4.11. The role of MAB in woman´s rights struggles ... 92
4.11.1 MAB´s agenda for women: participation and organization at the grassroots ... 94
4.11.2. Claims and spaces for action ... 97
4.11.3. Achievements and challenges ... 103
5. Conclusions ... 111
Bibliography ... 115
Appendix 1. List of interviews ... 123
1. INTRODUCTION
The main socio-environmental conflict in Brazil for last three decades is the Belo Monte mega-dam in the Amazon region. It is the principal project of Brazil´s Growth Acceleration Program (Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento - PAC), located in a region previously abandoned by the state and a standing symbol of social and environmental destruction and disregard for the people affected (ISA 2015). Although the premises of the Belo Monte project is narrated through guarantees of national development and progress, indigenous groups and social movements have opposed the dam from the start because of the illegalities committed during planning and implementation of the project as well as its evident
consequences for local peoples and communities, vulnerable to sudden and vast socio- environmental change (Braun 2015; Kuijpers 2013; McCully 2001; Roy 2001; Scudder &
Colson 1982). Little attention however, has been paid to study how women, a particularly exposed group, experience the nature of dam-induced development. Dam-affected women are in general, overlooked both in terms of life-changing effects and their participation and claims against authoritarian decision-makers and biased processes that control such mega-dams as well as their accompanying projects for resettlement and compensations, which disrupt
women´s lives, families, livelihoods, communities and safety (Buechler et al. 2015; Kothari et al. 2005; Srinivasan 2004). “The large dam literature usually describes the project-affected person as a genderless entity, rather than as a woman or man with different interests and aspirations” (Mehta & Srinivasan 2000: 2). The UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) have repeatedly, since the mid 1970´s, called for more research and data on women's interests in global development issues to include them on the agenda for national and
international policy debates (Farrior 2009). In Brazil however, anti-dam organizations and peasant women´s movements have for several decades, addressed the severe implications large dams cause for women. According to the report Affected by Dams developed by the Special Committee of the Council for the Defence of the Human Individual (CDDPH), the promoters, builders and investors of dams in Brazil, severely violate human rights because of their inadequate social planning and lack of concern for the affected people´s lives and losses.
Large dams therefore aggravate already serious social, cultural and economic inequalities.
The same report finds that women are the group most seriously and intensely affected because they lack means and solutions to reconstruct their lives after displacement. The poor and prejudiced planning, implementation and operation of dams, therefore, causes processes of impoverishment and marginalization that hit women harder than any other group in society
(CDDPH 2010: 54). Still, there are very few academic studies that consider the correlation of large dams, women and social and environmental justice (Braun 2015; Mehta & Srinivasan 2000). This study explores precisely these issues in the context of the Belo Mote mega-dam in the Eastern part of the Brazilian Amazon.
In June 2010, the license to build the Belo Monte hydropower dam, the third largest in the world, was granted after a thirty yearlong polemic debate in Brazil. The project´s size, magnitude in public funding, private investments, accumulation of resources, its immense environmental destruction and human impacts has given this case international attention (Fearnside 2006; Jaichand & Sampaio 2013). As mentioned, little notice has been given, to study how women, are impacted in different ways during (and likely well beyond) the construction period, and how they participate and act for reform and change for those affected. What is constantly being devalued are local people´s needs to protect their cultural and traditional ways of subsistence and more than any, those of vulnerable groups, women amongst them. This research, therefore, aims to contribute reducing this information-gap by producing new, applicable information about the Belo Monte dam, women and social and environmental justice. These issues are relevant because it concerns thousands of women´s struggle for just distribution, recognition and inclusion in decision-making processes in the current conflict about the Belo Monte dam and in other conflicts over large dams worldwide.
It is also an important issue for the future, because the Belo Monte dam sets a precedent for the implementation processes of 30 new dams projected in the Amazon region for the next twenty years (Fearnside 2015). This study constitutes an effort to join gender perspectives with social and environmental justice theory from the ground up, based on first-hand information compiled from field-research in areas affected by the Belo Monte dam.
1.1. Objectives and research questions
This study has the following two objectives, from which derive the corresponding research questions:
Objective 1: To know the impacts that the Belo Monte mega-dam has on local women, and to study why and how these impacts occur.
Taking the conceptual frameworks of gender and the three dimensions of social and environmental justice (distribution, recognition, participation), I will first investigate how
“local” is regulated by the interests behind the Belo Monte dam and how these mark, in terms of poor distribution of resources and social and cultural misrecognition, the situation of dam- affected women and the local communities in general.
Research question 1: How do affected women, public servants and activists, experience the transformations caused by the Belo Monte dam and their effects on women?
Objective 2: To learn how affected women, involved in social movements, react to the effects of the Belo Monte hydropower dam, and what results their struggle has given.
In order to accomplish this objective, I examine the participation of women in social
movements to fight for recognition, change and reform in relation to affected people´s rights and especially those of women. As such, I analyze the work the Movement of Dam-Affected People’s (MAB) at different scales to protect people´s rights and interests. Women´s
initiatives in the Movement will be highlighted.
Research question 2: How do women, linked to social movements, react to the effects of the Belo Monte dam, and what are the results of their struggle?
1.2. Structure of the thesis
The second chapter which follows, explains the area of study and it outlines the methodology and development of the research. Chapter 3 introduces the theoretical framework and
describes the main concepts used in the study, which include the gender perspective and social and environmental justice theories. Chapter 4 presents the results and discussion of the thesis in view of the theoretical frameworks as presented in Chapter 3. This chapter is
introduced by providing background information about the legal controversies that surround the expropriation, consultation and licensing processes, in which made the Belo Monte project possible and provoked the impacts and conflict. Next follows the two parts of the thesis: Part I presents and discuss the results that aim to fulfil the first objective: To know the impacts that the Belo Monte mega-dam has on local women, and to study why and how these impacts occur. Part II presents and discuss the results that correspond to the second objective: To
learn how affected women, involved in social movements, react to the effects of the Belo Monte hydropower dam, and what results their struggle has given. In this second part, I analyse the way dam-affected women, linked to social movements, organize and react to the social transformations of the Belo Monte dam and how they direct their claims for
recognition. I study the way women find support and contribute in social movements, focusing on the Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens (MAB – Movement of People Affected by Dams, Brazil) and the way this Movement campaigns for justice, recognition and participation, in line with the theories used in this research study. This way, the information obtained in Part I provides the key arguments of the study that concern understanding how and why gendered impacts are misrecognized in the Belo Monte distribution struggle. In Part II, I analyse how women participate for change and reform through participation in social movements. Chapter 5 presents the conclusions.
2. METHODOLOGY
2.1. Project background and research approach
My personal background and set of beliefs on issues revolving dams and affected women and people has helped navigating the progress of the research project. My understanding of distribution conflicts caused by the construction of large dams agree with the transformative outlook, that contest imposed structural policies and laws that tramples on marginalized groups, raising questions about issues of power and social justice (Creswell 2013) . This has to do with the years I was employed in “Fundación Nueva Cultura del Agua” (FNCA) http://www.fnca.eu, which is a Spanish non-profit organization constituted by 200 members from universities, research institutions, public administration, private sector and civil society.
FNCA promotes sustainable water policies and socially just water management through education, research projects, workshops, manifestations and artistic activities. I was employed to coordinate and participate in an international multi-media exhibition called Water, Rivers and People (Agua, Rios y Pueblos – ARP in Spanish acronym), which was about showing the human rights abuses resulting from mainstream environmental policies, and also to support the action agendas of dam-affected people´s movements around the world. Under the supervision of Dr. Pedro Arrojo (Goldman Environmental Prize 2003, University of Zaragoza), I carried out several photo-stories in Norway, Spain, Mexico and Peru for the photo exhibition and a book. In parallel, we were receiving photo-documentaries about other cases that other participants were sending from around the world. What I realised was that in every country and location where dams were planned or under construction, the same
devastating problems occurred. I also learnt that the most dramatic element of all, in environmental conflicts, is the widespread disregard for people´s lives and losses and the invisibility and neglect of the human suffering that occur in parallel with big development projects, and that the only means affected people have in many places, is to join social movements in a common struggle to confront social oppression and to change policies. The years I worked and learnt with the Water, Rivers and People project have been decisive for the choice of topic for this thesis.
The Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens (MAB – Movement of People Affected by Dams, Brazil) participated in the ARP exhibition to the Río+20 summit in Rio de Janeiro in
2013, showing it in the pavilion for civil society. The collaboration with MAB brought me to São Paulo and the Brazilian Amazon for the first time. A number of international
collaborators, activists, sponsors and people from the academia were attending this meeting, and in this context, MAB had arranged field trips to visit areas impacted by large dams and to talk to local people affected by them. I joined the fieldtrip that went to the Xingu River where Belo Monte was under construction and to the Tapajós river that are under threat by a chain of large dams.
The field-trip to the Xingu and Tapajos basins in the fall of 2013 was coordinated and organized by the Amazonian unit of MAB. In the Xingu basin territory, they arranged meetings with affected people in their homes in Altamira, by the trans-Amazonian highway and in the occupied land in Brazil Novo. We visited the massive construction site of Belo Monte, and we rented a boat to see the Xingu river and some islands and forest that shortly would be flooded. Then we flew over to the Tapajós River where we visited a remote riverside village and several Munduruku villages, to speak to the indigenous people about their situation regarding the planned dams on the Tapajós River and some of its tributaries. In both cities, Altamira and Itaituba, MAB arranged meetings where people from civil society, indigenous groups, university, farmers (some of them landless), youth organization, black women´s movement, public officers and priests linked to MAB, attended. Without going into the details of this trip, as I have used a limited amount of collected data for the thesis, it was very important as a foundation for the field-work carried out in July 2015, because it gave me the opportunity to better understand the social and environmental dynamics of the Amazon by visiting dam-affected areas and talking to people who live there and listen to their concerns and experiences. It was also my contacts in MAB who told me about the women´s platform within MAB that had been initiated to include more women in the movement, arrange activities such as a national meeting for women, demonstrations and making political encounters where they presented and further developed the demands of the affected women.
A wide range of activities were arranged for and by women because MAB had seen over the years that women are more directly and intensely affected by large dams than men. Many of the contacts I got in 2013, were interviewed during field-work in 2015, and many of them helped me to connect with other key informants. MAB in this respect, was a door-opener because when they introduced me to affected people, social movements and other
respondents, I felt that people were more willing to share their thoughts and experiences, when I was introduced by people they trusted. It was also an advantage having met many of
the affected people and people in social movements in 2013, I believe that this was important as well, to see that I was still working with questions of the affected people´s situation and claims, and theirs in particular. In the first field-trip in 2013, the Belo Monte dam was under construction but the Xingu was still running free, but in 2015, the dam was almost ready and many areas were already flooded by the reservoir. Therefore, I had the opportunity to
interview several of the respondents before and after expropriation and resettlement.
This study is based on qualitative research methods, which are suitable to answer this study´s research questions exposed in the previous section. Qualitative research, according to
Creswell “is an approach for exploring and understanding the meaning individuals or groups ascribe to a social or human problem” (2013: 4), and it allows for a broader and less
restrictive design than other research approaches. Usually, a research design consists of linear sequences of steps, starting with a problem statement, objectives, research questions, data collection stages, analysis and interpretations of the data and findings by the support of existing theories and literature (Creswell 2013; Maxwell 2008). An entirely different strategy, known as the "garbage can" model, attempts to capture some of the chaos of many research studies. This model focuses attention on the way a choice changes over time as a result of the interaction of data, theories, methods, resources and solutions during the course of research without following a fixed design (Cohen et al. 1972; Grady & Wallston 1988). As such, this study certainly felt chaotic and out of control at times after the field trip and data-collection had been carried out, mainly because of large amount of data and feeling uncertain about how to frame the research theoretically. The solution in the middle of chaos, was landing on the choice of employing inductive content analysis as a tool to extract, define, organize and structure the findings, allowing the descriptive data (messages, perceptions, views and experiences etc.) to open the path for the research.
As mentioned, before the analysis had been carried out, I had not been able to find the right theory that could frame the findings and support the discussion. My first intention was to employ a feminist political ecology framework, but I was struggling to make this framework convey the objective of the study and answer the research questions. The messages of the respondents (findings) thus, made it clear what issues in the study were important to highlight, examine and discuss further. From the findings then, I found that the conceptual frameworks of gender and social and environmental justice would provide an overall positioning of the study in terms of the effects caused by the Belo Monte dam on women as well as their actions for change and reform. For the above reasons, I didn´t follow a linear-designed strategy, but
rather a flexible and non-sequential approach was driving the work, where the steps after completing data-collection such as analysing data, adjusting theory, sharpening the research questions, discussing and writing up were going on simultaneously, each task influencing the others (Maxwell 2008). Meaning in qualitative research then, derive from the way people perceive their own and other people´s situation, and importantly, also from the researcher´s worldviews. (Berg & Lune 2012; Creswell 2013).
The broader ideas of this study draw on the transformative worldview, which is an approach used by researchers who focus on social justice and struggles for human rights and who believe that research should involve politics and political change agendas to confront social oppression at different scales. The transformative approach, just like this research, focus on the experiences and perceptions of individuals within marginalized groups, and particularly
“how their lives have been constrained by oppressors and the strategies that they use to resist, challenge and subvert these constraints” (Mertens 2010 cited in Creswell 2013: 10). When studying a particular group (dam-affected women), the researchers who are guided by transformative worldview, link political and social action to the inequalities that affects the group being studied. Also, they often give the participants a voice to the outside world as well as supporting their struggle when the researcher can contribute strengthening their agenda for social change and inclusion (Creswell 2013). In this study, the transformative worldview has helped shaping the research objective, and the qualitative methods have provided important tools to advance towards this objective.
2.2. Study area and Belo Monte dam
The research for this study took place in the Xingu River Basin in the North of Brazil (Fig. 1).
I circumscribed the study to the municipalities of Altamira and Brazil Novo in the state of Pará because a large portion of people affected by Belo Monte dam live in these
municipalities and in Altamira city. A majority of the interviews were carried out in Altamira, which is a small city situated on the shores of the Xingu River, a tributary of the Amazon river. A few interviews were conducted in the occupied camp of Novo Horizonte in the municipality of Brazil Novo. Altamira and Brazil Novo municipalities are home to different groups of people, including indigenous, ribeirinhos (riverside communities), quilombolas (African decedents), urban fisher folks and peasant workers. The Amazonian peoples have an
inherent relation to the Xingu river and their diverse cultures and societies depend on the biodiversity of the rainforest and the natural cycles and yields of the river for their self- subsistence, livelihoods and household economies.
Fig. 1. Altamira, Novo Horizonte in Brazil Novo and Belo Monte region. Source: Rio Times (2013).
The Belo Monte hydroelectric plant was officially opened on the 5th of May 2016 by President Dilma Rousseff, and is the world's third largest dam with installed capacity of 11,233.1 MW, only behind China´s Three Gorges dam the Itaipú binational located on the border between Brazil and Paraguay. The Belo Monte consists of two large dams, two large reservoirs and supporting dikes. Due to the design of the Belo Monte complex, the flow within a 10 km stretch of the river called Volta Grande (Big Bend) will be totally changed (Hall & Branford 2012). As shown in Fig.1, a large dam and two 500 meters wide and 75 km
long canals cut Volta Grande off of the Xingu River, transferring most of the river´s flow to an artificial lake before it is lead into the turbines at the Belo Monte site. These canals divert 80% of the Xingu River from its course, with the result of changing the lives and livelihoods of traditional communities, fishermen and indigenous peoples who live in this stretch of the river. As a consequence of the change in the Big Bend, several fish species that exist only in this stretch of the river are likely to disappear and it will become difficult for traditional and indigenous people to access the city of Altamira at to sell their yields and do other tasks. “The Xingu River is essential for the subsistence of the riverine communities, as fish is their most important source of protein and the river is the only mode of transport in these isolated areas.
Furthermore, the lowering of the water table will destroy the agricultural production of the region and affect water quality and the rainforest in a much larger region” (Kuijpers et al.
2014: 790). Above the main dam, the reservoirs are currently being filled and they will eventually inundate 516 km2 of land, of this is 400 km2 standing rainforest. According to International Rivers, as much as 1,500 square kilometres of forest will be affected as a consequence of the raised water level (2012). The projected filling of the reservoir to its planned full height would flood not only thousands of acres of rainforest but also a part of Altamira city and more dispersed populated areas in the municipalities Altamira, Vitória do Xingu and Brazil Novo.
In Altamira, around 25% of the city´s urban area will be flooded, and the residents who live below the 100-meter altitude level (green areas in Fig. 2) of the dam have the right to choose between being resettled or compensated. At least 22,000 people, including 1400 indigenous people from different communities have been evicted, and about 500 people who live in areas affected by the reservoir is fighting for their right to housing (MAB 2016b; Neto 2014).
People have mainly been transferred to urban resettlements (red areas in Fig. 2), some of these are as far as 7 km from the river and city centre. Many families in Altamira city however, live from fishing and depend on easy access to the river.
Before the resettlement process started, the city underwent a strong population growth due to the immigration of male workers that came to work on the construction of Belo Monte; its inhabitants raised from 99.000 in 2010 to 150.000 in 2013 (Estronioli 2013). In recent years, Altamira city has become troubled with rising rates of violence, property entitlement frauds, land clearance, invasion of indigenous lands, drug trafficking, and sexual exploitation
amongst many other social problems. All these issues have been escalating after the initiation
was carried out for the project, did not taken this reality into account and limited the impact area of Belo Monte strictly to the areas along the Xingu that would be flooded (Kuijpers et al.
2014).
Fig. 2. Location of urban resettlement areas in Altamira (marked in red, flooded areas in green). Source:
GEDTAM, 2014 (Neto 2014).
2.3. Sampling approach
In qualitative studies, nonprobability samples are generally used, which means that researcher select participants who are likely to have information about a specific phenomenon that the average population not necessarily know much about (Berg & Lune 2012). Qualitative researchers are looking for good respondents that are informed, clear, knowledgeable to uncover underlying principles and patterns in the perceptions and ways of reasoning of the informants (Flyvbjerg 2006). There are different approaches of nonprobability sampling and I
used a mix of them at different stages of the project development.
The materials collected in my fist trip to the areas of study in 2013 can be considered as coming from a convenience sample, also called accidental sample, when I met potential participants for the study. I include the interviews and conversations that were carried out in 2013 in this category even if I had not yet decided that the study should focus on affected women. In this first trip, I interviewed a lot of people that MAB had assembled and therefore were easily available (Berg & Lune 2012). These persons shared their thoughts and gave a lot of valuable information about the social impacts generated by the Belo Monte dam. The conversations where conducted with the intention to extract as much information as possible with the time and setting available, and I filmed all of them.
This footage was used to prepare the proper field-work, and before returning to Altamira in 2015, I contacted some of these persons by email, others I called after arrival to ask them to participate in the study, this time with a clear focus and better prepared questions. Then, I carried out a purposive sampling procedure where I used my understanding and contacts in Altamira to select respondents who were, or could add information about dam-affected women and their lived experiences. In parallel, I also made use of snowball sampling where respondents that were already participating in the study put me in contact with new
respondents that could provide new or distinct information. Due to the limited time I stayed in Altamira, snowball sampling showed to be both practical and efficient. I was able to contact certain groups of women, civil society or public officers that were crucial to include in the study. It was much easier to establish confidence with new participants when I was introduced by people of their own confidence (Berg & Lune 2012). A disadvantage may have been that most of my initial contacts were all linked to the MAB, and therefore it is possible that the perceptions and lived experiences of many of the participants were biased by the philosophy of this movement. I did my best to balance this by talking to affected women from other organizations like environmental, feminist and black women´s movements and respondents that were introduced to me and that were not directly involved in the MAB organization.
2.4. Interviews
The methods I used to collect primary data were semi-structured interviews and recordings of meetings and forums. As mentioned above, data collection happened in two periods; two
weeks in October 2013 and two weeks in July 2015. The first-hand data collected in 2013 was mainly used for the preparation of this study and field-work, however I included punctual information that could broaden certain issues for the analysis. During field-work in 2015, I carried out semi-structured interviews, sometimes accompanied by my contact at MAB or alone with the respondents at their work or in a place of their choice so they were comfortable to share their insights and experiences relevant to this study. In total, I carried out twenty-five interviews, of which eighteen were conducted in 2015 and six were conducted in both 2013 and 2015 and one in 2013 (see interview guide for clarification). I also included selected fragments of two speeches that were recorded in MAB´s National Meeting for Dam-Affected People in 2013.
Because of the complexity of the research topic, and to maintain the focus when guiding all the interviews and conversations, it was necessary to have an inquiry guide at hand with central open-ended questions in line with the objective of the research. In this way, I could keep a certain pattern on key topics to be covered in the interviews without imposing a track for the conversations based on my own prior understanding of the objectives of the study, but rather try to discover how the respondents thought and felt about the issues in question (Berg
& Lune 2012). I also treated every informant as an individual, without linking them to any social group, ethnicity or social movement. Often, the interviews developed spontaneously into open conversations only asking open questions when something was unclear or when it was relevant to broaden the explanations on certain topics. I slightly changed my questions during field-work according to what I learnt by talking to the different informants. Therefore, I didn´t usually follow a specific order when asking questions, but rather placing follow-up questions when needed or introducing other aspects to the interview. Some persons were more reserved and responded briefly and punctual to questions, and in these situations the
questionnaires turned out to be very useful. The semi-structured interviews thus allowed for setting the theme and guide the progress of the conversations according to the research topic.
Giving freedom of the different interviewee to structure the answers (conversation), enhanced varied and interesting findings that helped understanding the implications of the Belo Monte dam on women from the subject´s perspective, also enabling comparisons across the
interviews (Berg & Lune 2012).
I video-recorded all interviews (with two exceptions), always with the consent of the
interviewees. I put the camera on a tripod, adjusted the sound and image and left it recording while conducting the interviews without paying much attention to the camera, but I explained
my reasons for filming. One person did not agree to be filmed and only the sound was recorded for professional reasons. In another occasion a person seemed to be affected by it, and I took notes instead of filming. I did not observe that people took much notice of it, many of the people I spoke to were used to speak in public, and they were very happy to participate in this study that concerned their situation. Having film- or sound recorded the interviews was a great advantage for me and for those who helped with the translations, as everything was transcribed in detail in English. Reviewing the footage during analysis also made it possible to include people’s gestures and tone of voice when emphasising certain issues.
2.5. Data analysis
The transcripts (and footage) were examined by means of content analysis, which is a flexible method broadly used to describe and interpret data produced during research of written and visual messages (White & Marsh 2006). According to Berg & Lune “Content analysis is a careful, detailed, systematic examination and interpretation of a particular body of material in an effort to identify patterns, themes, biases and meanings” (2012: 349-350). Generally, content analysis is performed on different types of communications such as texts, transcripts, photographs, video and audio recordings (Berg & Lune 2012). The transcribed interviews also included notes on gestures, signs of sentiments and tone of voice to make emphasis or add information to the study.
Elo and Kyngäs (2008) explains that content analysis usually is conducted in an deductive or inductive way, dependent on the purpose of the study and existing information. I conducted an inductive analysis because the literature and information on the topic are limited and disperse, but mainly because this approach provides direct information from the contestants without imposing predetermined categories or theoretical perspectives of the empirical data, which is an advantage when searching for patterns of participant´s feelings, perceptions and lived experiences in the particular context of the Belo Monte dam (Hsieh & Shannon 2005).
Inductive content analysis is an approach where key points and meanings (such as words, thoughts, concepts and emotional reactions) are identified in the raw data, then coded and classified into a set of categories. After this open coding, the categories that emerged, were grouped and sorted under headings and sub-headings to reduce the number of categories by fusing related themes under wider groupings without eliminating relevant aspects of the
respondent´s message (Berg & Lune 2012; Elo & Kyngäs 2008). The purpose of creating categories is to provide a system that describe and provide new insights about one or several phenomenon, and most importantly, to answer the research questions (Berg & Lune 2012; Elo
& Kyngäs 2008; Robson 1993; White & Marsh 2006). The criteria of selecting and including data was first of all determined by its applicability to answer the research questions and to add information that revealed social patterns, relationships and processes linked to the research questions (Berg & Lune 2012; White & Marsh 2006). I used the three dimensions of social and environmental justice, namely, distribution, recognition and participation (Schlosberg 2003; Schlosberg 2009) to frame the discussion that transpired from the findings. I divided the environmental justice framework in two parts according the research questions: Justice in the context of recognition and distribution framed the findings and discussion of RQ 1: How do people who live in affected areas of the Belo Monte dam think about dam-induced
development and its effects on women? and questions of justice and participation framed RQ 2: How do women, linked to social movements, react to the effects of the Belo Monte dam, and what are the results of their struggle? As these concepts are interconnected and cannot be seen independently to understand the fundamentals for social and environmental justice, all the three dimensions were mentioned in both parts of discussion, although the main structure is as explained above. The analytical framework is summarized in Fig. 3.
Fig. 3. Scheme of the analytical framework.
I nterviews Affected people Researchers/ academics State and regional government Social movements/ civil society/
church Recordings Speakers at meetings
Video recordings and text
transcripts. I dentification of items (recording units)
Inductive content analysis Social and environmental justice Categories
RQ 1: How do affected women, public servants and activists, experience the transformations caused by the Belo Monte dam and their effects on women?
RQ 2: How do women, linked to social movements, react to the effects of the Belo Monte dam, and what are the results of their struggle?
Recognition
…
…
…
Distribution
…
…
…
Participation
…
…
…
2.6. Limitations of the study
This research is an attempt to study social transformation and civil actions in the context of the Belo Monte dam, as experienced by women, within the perspective of gender and three dimensions of social and environmental justice framework. Other theories could also have been used to broaden the knowledge on this phenomenon such as feminist political ecology and feminist political economy. These theories direct attention towards power relations, scales, social, environmental and economic sustainability, scarcity, politics, poverty and social justice from a gendered lens. Many of these issues are mentioned as they overlap the conceptual framework of this study, but not studied in depth, because I needed to limit and focus the study according the scope of this thesis.
Other limitations concern the concept of gender, which includes all individuals and human relations in a society. In the case of the population affected by the Belo Monte dam, both women and men are part of vulnerable groups. Still, women are often more intensely impacted than men, which give rise to specific problems (that relates to the fact of being women), which men also share but experience differently. I have deliberately avoided discussions on comparisons between the situation of women and men, because it is not the focus of this study. The concept of gender (also when focusing on women), addresses diversity in plural societies as this concept crosscuts women with differences in ethnicity, race, religion, age and class. (Cossman 1990; Momsen 2010). Studying affected women as a homogenous group in such a diverse society as the one in the Pará region is not optimal, and therefore, I cannot claim that this study is representative for all groups of women in Altamira and the surrounding region, but only the sample-groups, which are dam-affected women and men (from different ethnicities and cultural groups) linked to social movements and state officials that work with affected people on a regular basis. This is an important limitation although it is probable that the sample-group represent a large number of women from different backgrounds in Altamira. The informants of this study however, belong to different groups of the population such as indigenous, riverine, peasant, black as well as different urban and rural groups of women. I have not made any distinctions between their experiences because of their background because I do not have enough empirical data to do such a division for the analysis.
An important restriction of this thesis concerns crimes against socio-environmental activists that live under the fear of murder, violence or criminalization for showing openly their opposition. According to Global Witness, a UK-based watchdog, Brazil was the deadliest country for environmental activists in 2015, with 50 people murdered for their activism, 40%
of these were indigenous people that were protecting their life-supporting resources (Holmes 2016). I do not however, have enough data to study how these threats affect women in affected areas in particular. It is a major human-rights problem that affects activists in the Belo Monte context and also many other campaigners and indigenous peoples that oppose other extraction projects such as mining, illegal loggers and plantation owners in Pará and all over Latin America.
Another limitation of the study is not having included interviews with Norte Energia who developed the Basic Environmental Plan (PBA - Plano Básico Ambiental) or the federal agency IBAMA (The Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources), which is under the Ministry of Environment and responsible for granting the environmental license for any project that degrade the environment. As a consequence, the claims made against Norte Energia and IBAMA have not been triangulated. Further, I was slightly limited by the safety precautions I had to take during fieldwork in a city known for being violent, especially being foreign and when I was on my own. I had to cancel some interviews for this reason, and there is especially one interview that I regret not being able to carry out, of an indigenous family from the Arara tribe who had been resettled in one of the areas furthest away from the river (about 7 km), and who had lost three of their children because they could not access medical care.
3. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
3.1. Bridging gender and social and environmental justice theories
The analytical approach of this research, assumes that Brazil´s societies, power structures and social relations contain deeply rooted gender divisions, which makes women especially vulnerable to the sudden social and environmental changes caused by the Belo Monte dam.
With this backdrop, the two research questions involve issues on women and how dam- induced transformations affect them. They also concern women´s participation and actions in a broader fight for just compensations, public policies and regulations, which remain
unnoticed in dominant ideologies that assumes a top-down view on development. Theories on environmental justice and the social and environmental justice movement emerged and were shaped by the principles and actions of social movements that fought against environmental mismanagement and crimes to protect citizen´s rights of marginalised people. For this reason, they are central in understanding dam-affected women´s position in Altamira and Novo Horizonte in the municipality of Brazil Novo (where the study takes place). The framework of environmental justice then has two uses that are highly related. The first and most common form, describes social movements that, broadly speaking, focus on the fair distribution of environmental benefits and burdens. They centre on the participation of local and minority groups of trying to change a powerful system to prevent companies from conducting
environmental damaging practices in areas where a high number of minorities and ethnicities are living (Bullard 2000; Schlosberg 2004; 2009). The second form of environmental justice refers to an interdisciplinary social science, that includes theories of the environment, society, justice, environmental law and governance, environmental policy and planning, development, sustainability, and political ecology (Miller & Spoolman 2007; Schlosberg 2009)
.
This study centres on the three dimensions of social and environmental justice theory, namely distribution, recognition and participation, which have been interpreted through a gender perspective. These three principles show the complexity of justice and offer explanations of the causes of distribution conflicts and how they could be solved, in which links to the philosophy and struggle of social movements. Part I centres on the distribution and recognition concepts of justice, and Part II focus on participation. Although the gender perspective is linked to the three dimensions of social and environmental justice theory, I
focus on women, rather than speaking of gender relations or feminism. Analysing the findings by the use of the gender perspective of environmental justice framework then, is the focus for the discussion of this study.
3.2. The gender perspective
Gender as a perspective within cultural, social and human sciences, emerged in the late
twentieth century to explain the inequalities between men and women in society. In this study, interrogations on gender are considered in the perspective of social and environmental justice, which is relevant in order to study the situation for women, especially in the context of the implementation of large dams. There has been a considerable amount of research that shows the negative human and social cost of neoliberal economic policies, where the state is being hollowed out by organs of global governance and international capital whose interest is to build dams as investments and to provide energy to other sectors such as mining and
industrial agriculture (Evans 2011). In this process, natural resources (such as land and water in rivers) have been privatized and brought to the market and turned into attractive business opportunities and thereby speeding up an unsustainable use of these resources, impacting more than any the most vulnerable sectors of society (Arrojo 2006). Some research have also considered the gender dimension of neoliberal economic structures, showing that women disproportionately bear the cost of these changes (Buechler & Hanson 2015; MAB 2011;
McCully 2001; Mehta & Srinivasan 2000; O'brien & Williams 2016; Scudder & Colson 1982;
WCD 2000).
The concept of gender refers to the social roles that identify women and men from their natural difference. Jill Steans points out that: “gender does not refer to what men and women are biologically, but to the ideological and material relations which exist between them”
(Steans 1998 p. 10). Gender should be understood then as the social and cultural organization that societies consider distinctive female or male regarding their roles, responsibilities, behaviours, activities and qualities. (O'brien & Williams 2016). Gender also means gender identity, stressing the notion of multiple identities, including people who step out of their socially given gender roles such as transgender persons (Momsen 2010). Although this study doesn´t talk about transgender persons, the point is that the concept of gender includes other identities than just women or men (Butler 2004). Nevertheless, the gender perspective mostly
refers to male and female, and it offers an analytical tool to understand processes that creates difference, and opens up to analysing limitations and opportunities that are different for men and for women in different social settings. Gender roles vary around the world (although some responsibilities like domestic work and childcare seems to be the similar in most
cultures) and they are sensitive to the changes brought by large development projects and may change women´s opportunities or practices in domains like within the family, daily life, communities, cultures, institutions and politics (Momsen 2010). Critical theorist and philosopher Nancy Fraser understands gender as a two-sided category, which involves both an economic dimension and a cultural dimension. In order to understand why and how social and environmental injustice impact women, it is necessary to consider gender from the
perspectives of distribution and recognition. The distributive perspective in relation to gender, according to Fraser, sets a basic standard to organize labour in society that divides between the higher paid male labour which is seen as “productive”, and the low- or unpaid
“reproductive” female that includes domestic labour and childcare. “The result is an economic structure that generates gender-specific forms of distributive injustice” (Fraser 2007: 26).
From the recognition perspective, Fraser sees gender as a status differentiation where gender injustice derives from established authoritarian constructed norms that benefit the
“masculine” and discriminate the “feminine”. As these norms are customary in many places, women suffer gender specific status abuses, including discrimination at work, domestic violence, sexual assaults, provocations in daily life, and marginalization and exclusion in public domains. “These harms are injustices of misrecognition (…) they cannot be overcome by redistribution alone but require additional independent remedies of recognition” (Fraser 2007: 26). Claims for redistribution of costs and benefits as well as recognition of difference are amongst the main concerns that fuel women´s participation in social and environmental conflicts. In this study, the gender perspective provides a tool to explore how the status of women have changed in the context of the effects of the Belo Monte dam, and how affected women approach the struggle to obtain social and environmental justice.
3.3. Social and environmental justice
Environmental justice is a concept that evolved from local conflicts against environmental racism into the objectives of environmental policy-making and law enforcement. The aim of environmental justice advocates is to ensure that all people, regardless of gender, race,
ethnicity and class, are protected from impacts of resource extraction and environmental hazards as well as discrimination in the enforcement of environmental laws and regulations amongst many other afflictions. Another goal is to include affected people in the making of environmental and public policies and legislations (Fraser 2001; Holifield 2001; Schlosberg 2003; Young 1990). The academic field of environmental justice and the movement with the same name, derive from the United States in the early 1970´s, from a number of local
conflicts against massive dumping of environmental hazards, led by African American grassroots groups, claiming their rights to live in a healthy environment (Holifield 2001).
“They began to treat their struggle for environmental equity as a struggle against
institutionalized racism and an extension of the quest for social justice” (Bullard & Wright 1987: 32-33). The first national protests against the landfill in Afton in Warren County in 1982 is emblematic in this respect. The Afton community had been selected as a burial site for more than 24,500 square meters of soil contaminated by polychlorinated biphenyls
(PCB´s) that had been illegally dumped along the roads of fourteen North Carolina counties in 1978. The major issue in terms of justice was that more than 84% of the population in Afton community were African Americans, and amongst the poorest in North Carolina (Bullard 2000). Robert Bullard claimed that the selected sites for the toxic dumping in Afton and the United States in general, was a strategy he called “path of least resistance”, where the politically strong took advantage of the exposed position of black communities that had no means to face politicians to stop practices of toxic dumping or deal with the consequences of contamination (Bullard 2000; Holifield 2001). The Warren County conflict, shows that the civil rights framework have many parallels with environmental justice, and it also confirm that environmental conflicts first of all, are about justice, contesting environmental inequality and devastation to protect marginalized and poor populations (Schlosberg 2009). The
environmental justice principles have since then been integrated in the claims of social and environmental movements worldwide as a response to the human and ecological injustices brought on by the neoliberal economic policies and globalization. In these conflicts people demand fair distribution of costs and benefits, recognition of difference and participation in decision-making processes by the people whose lives and livelihoods rely on the
environment, and for those that need a series of incentives to rebuild their lives after environmental impacts.
3.3.1. The three dimensions of social and environmental justice
Three central dimensions coexist in current theories on social and environmental justice namely: distribution, recognition and participation (Fraser 1999; 2001; Schlosberg 2003;
2009). The distribution concept is rooted in the political-economic structure of society and involves equity in cost-benefit share of resources, assets and capabilities (Barry 1995; Fraser 1995; Rawls 1971; Schlosberg 2009; Young 1990). Recognition involves accepting difference amongst people so that every women and men are respected as full citizens regardless of their social, cultural, ethnical and economic background (Honneth 2004; Schlosberg 2003; Young 1990). Participation refers to the inclusion of all parties in decision-making processes so that everyone can obtain information and voice their interests in projects and practices that affect them. None of these three notions can assure social and environmental justice alone, hence what is needed is environmental politics that include them all (Fraser 2001; Schlosberg 2009).
The general understanding of social and environmental justice is often limited to the issue of equity in the distribution of costs and benefits. This perhaps stem from the influential work of John Rawls called A Theory of Justice, seen by many as the pillar for later discussions on social and environmental justice (Michelbach et al. 2003). Broadly speaking, Rawls centres on the importance of fair processes (Schlosberg 2004) and claims that well-organized societies will construct fair distribution practices. He defines justice as “a standard whereby the distributive aspects of the basic structure of society are to be assessed” (Rawls 1971: 9).
Translating the theory of Rawls into a social and environmental context, what Rawls believed was that justice is conditioned by the measures democracies would take to guarantee all citizens a just share of costs and benefits of environmental assets, as well as assuring people to exercise their basic rights and freedoms. The understanding of justice by another scholar, Brian Barry, differ from that of Rawls by stressing the importance of creating clear rules and principles that should determine the rights and duties of different parties. Fair systems and processes should set the standards for just allocation of costs and benefits, and rules would guide just institutions (Barry 1995 in Schlosberg 2004). Other academics such as Iris Young and Nancy Fraser, recognize distribution as one of the key aspects of justice, but think that justice has to be understood beyond the “distribution paradigm”. As Young puts it: “While distributional issues are crucial to a satisfactory conclusion of justice, it is a mistake to reduce social justice to distribution” (1990: 1). Fraser’s general argument is that “justice today requires both redistribution and recognition, as neither alone is sufficient” (Fraser 1999: 5).
Fraser who is known for her theory about the increasing demand for recognition of
differences amongst people and cultural groups that don´t adjust to the dominant majority, thinks that struggles for recognition are suppressed by the claims for economic redistribution (Fraser 1995; Robeyns 2003). Fraser argues that distribution and recognition cannot replace each other because they derive from two distinct sets of values; “distribution” has to do with the allocation of economic or livelihood supporting assets and “recognition” derives from the respect for- and acceptance of differences inherent in people, such as cultural identity,
ethnicity and gender (Fraser 1995). Further, she introduces the idea of bivalent collectivity to explain why social justice has a socio-economic and a cultural dimension that are intrinsically linked. A bivalent collectivity is a group of people that are exposed to both unjust distribution and cultural and social misrecognition where neither of these injustices are a consequence of the other, but they affect a person or a group both economically as well as culturally and socially. Gender is an example of a bivalent collectivity (Fraser in Robeyns 2003). Fraser therefore, suggests looking at gender “bifocally, simultaneously through two different lenses”
(Fraser 2007: 25). She argues that both views will show important issues of women´s
subordinated positions in terms of justice, but neither of them is sufficient alone to capture the whole set of causes and effects. When these two views are joined, the bivalent dimensions of gender´s social order appear: “the dimension of maldistribution and the dimension of
misrecognition that are fundamental to sexism. (…) To combat the subordination of women requires an approach that combines a politics of redistribution with a politics of recognition”
(Fraser 2007: 26).
Likewise, and valid to the gender perspective, does Iris Young think that the reasons why some people benefit and others end up in the short end of distributional inequity, derive from the lack of recognition which are demonstrated in different forms from insults, violence, degradation, expropriation, biased law enforcement and poor public policies in which
constrains people and their communities. Another of Young´s key arguments, is that this lack of recognition is the root of distributive injustice because people, groups, institutions, public and private actors come to naturalize and internalize these practices over time, generating the same attitudes in the lager social and political realms (Robbins 2012; Schlosberg 2004;
Young 1990) .
David Schlosberg draws on the thinking of Young and Fraser when he turns to examine how social and environmental movements articulate their claims for justice, and adds: “Here, the
the inequity in socio-economic and cultural status” (Schlosberg 2004: 522). Schlosberg thus agrees that distributional inequity and recognition are key elements of justice, but in practice, activists often find themselves excluded by the dominant social, cultural and economic sectors, and therefore they feel discriminated. This misrecognition is experienced both individually and as a society, and he therefore underscores the importance of including the
“participation” of affected people to obtain sustainable social and environmental justice (Schlosberg 2009). Also, for Young, the main dynamic to achieve both distributive justice and recognition of difference lies within decision-making structures of politics. She thinks that in order for a rule or decision to be fair, every actor involved should have a voice and be able to agree or reject without oppression. For a social condition to be just Young argues, it should allow everyone to cover all their needs and practice their freedom. In this way, justice itself requires participation which allows people to speak out about their concerns and also to defend democratic processes in which are crucial conditions for social justice (Young 1990).
While Young focus on individual participation, Schlosberg addresses the same issue in the context of social movements (2004: 522-523):
“Environmental justice activists call for policy-making procedures that encourage active community participation, institutionalize public participation, recognize community knowledge, and utilize cross-cultural formats at exchanges to enable the participation of as much diversity as exists in a community. Environmental justice groups consistently demand a ‘place at the table’ and the right to ‘speak for ourselves’.
The demand for this type of authentic, community-based participation comes out of the experience of disenfranchisement, a result of mis- or malrecognition. To challenge a range of cultural, political, and structural obstacles constructed by cultural
degradation, political oppression, and lack of political access, communities are coming to demand a voice and authentic participation”.
In continuation, Schlosberg thinks that a justice movement needs to be unified but at the same time diverse, because amplifying experiences and knowledge about different forms of
injustice, the movements will also enhance their capacities of promoting bottom-up
approaches in finding solutions to the problems. He believes that movements prove the power in the general hypothesis of Mary Parker Follett, that of: “unity in diversity” and “unity, without uniformity must be our aim” (Schlosberg 2009: 179), because simultaneously they raise a broad range of social and environmental justice issues.
